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Working with Spreadsheets

Open, close a spreadsheet application. Open, close spreadsheets.

To start Calc, click on the ‘Start’ button on your Windows machine. Click on ‘All Programs’ and then go to the ‘LibreOffice’ folder in the list of all programs which gets displayed. Click on the ‘LibreOffice’ folder and then click on ‘LibreOffice Calc’. This will start the Calc application.

Use the buttons below to navigate through the lesson

When Calc is started, the main window opens which has been shown below.

The highlighted portion shown in the above illustration is the ‘Main Menu Bar’. This is the most important menu bar in the Calc application and most of the operations in Calc can be performed from here. In this tutorial, we are going to use the main menu bar for performing a variety of different operations.
To close Calc, simply click on the ‘white cross icon with red background’ on the upper right corner of the Calc main window screen. This will close Calc.

Once the application has been started, then a new spreadsheet can be opened. To open a new spreadsheet, click on ‘File’ from the main menu bar. From the resulting drop-down, click on ‘New’ and from the sub-menu which is displayed, click on ‘Spreadsheet’. This will open a new spreadsheet.

To close a spreadsheet, simply click on the same white cross icon with a red background from the top right corner of the spreadsheet screen.

Create a new spreadsheet based on default template.

A default template is the one, which is used to create spreadsheets when any new spreadsheet is created. This means that when we create a new spreadsheet, it gets created based on the default template which has been set.

We are going to learn how to set a default template in the subsequent chapters. But to create a new spreadsheet based on the default template, simply follow the steps which have been given in the last section for opening a new spreadsheet. This creates a new spreadsheet based on the default template.

Save a spreadsheet to a location on a drive. Save a spreadsheet under another name to a location on a drive.

Once the changes to a spreadsheet have been made, we need to save this spreadsheet to a location on our computer. To save a spreadsheet, click on ‘File’ from the main menu bar. From the resulting drop-down, click on ‘Save As’. This opens the ‘Save As’ dialog box.

In this dialog box, we can browse to the folder where we want to save the spreadsheet file and thus select the appropriate location. To change the name by which the file will get saved, just enter the new name in the ‘File Name:’ field. After making these changes, click on ‘Save’. This will save the file to the location which has been specified and under the given file name.

To save a spreadsheet as another file type, follow the same steps as given above. This will open the ‘Save As’ dialog box. In this dialog box, under the ‘Save as type:’ field, select the appropriate file type as per the requirement and then click on ‘Save’. This will save the spreadsheet as the selected file type.

Switch between open spreadsheets.

You can open multiple spreadsheets at a time in Calc. In such a case, to switch between these spreadsheets, just click on the ‘Calc’ icon on the task bar of your computer. This icon will always get displayed whenever you are running Calc on your machine.

When this icon is clicked, then the names of all the active spreadsheets get displayed as has been shown above. Simply click on the name of the spreadsheet which you want to open and that spreadsheet will get opened. You can switch between different spreadsheets using this method.